I’ve written a lot about what it takes to create a new adventure hero from scratch — and now you can read a story where I tried to do just that. My story “The Cartography of Sudden Death” just appeared at Tor.com story “The Cartography of Sudden Death” just appeared at Tor.com, and it introduces Jemima Brookwater, a time traveler who helps one person every time she travels.
Illustration by Richard Anderson/Tor.com.
Jemima Brookwater comes from a distant future, where the superscience of metaphysics has solved a lot of our problems. But after she discovers a unique method of traveling through time, she finds herself trapped in the Gaven Empire, a horrible period on Earth’s history that lasted for hundreds of years and included atrocities that would make your brain boil to contemplate. She keeps jumping through time trying to get back to the future she comes from, but somehow she always seems to arrive at another point during the Gaven Empire’s long history.
How does she travel? Without giving away too much, let’s just say she needs someone important and famous to die unexpectedly, creating lots of ripples in causality. She searches out deaths that were already “supposed” to happen according to her history books. Other time travelers, however, aren’t so scrupulous.
Here’s how it begins:
Ythna came to the Beldame’s household when she was barely old enough to
walk. They took her from the nursery block in the middle of the night,
with nothing but the simple koton robe she was wearing, and carried the
tiny girl to a black shiny vehicle, a Monopod. Sitting in the back,
wearing a neat gray uniform and matching black gloves and shoes, was an
Officiator, who asked the young Ythna some questions. The next thing she
knew, she was riding a white cage on a wire over the mountains, up to
the gilded fortress where she would serve the Beldame for the rest of
her days, if she was lucky.
Ythna forgot the Officiator’s face, or whatever else he said to her,
but she would always remember what he said as she stepped, barefoot, out
of the cage as the sun rose over the golden house. He knelt before her
and spoke gently: “You are but one of a thousand retainers to the
Beldame. But each of you is a finger, or a toe. Your movements are her
movements. Do not make her a disgrace.”
Ythna lived in a tiny yellow dormitory room with nine other small
children, all of them sharing white-and-red uniforms and eating from the
same dispensary. Ythna learned to read and write basic Gaven texts, and
worked in the cavernous kitchen and boiler room of the golden fortress,
which was called Parathall. At night, the other children teased Ythna
and pinched her in places where the bruises wouldn’t show on her
golden-brown skin, under her retainer uniform. Two girls, the pale,
blonde Maryn and the olive-toned Yuli, appointed themselves the rulers
of Children’s Wing, and if Ythna didn’t please Maryn and Yuli she found
herself sealed inside a small wooden linen box, suffocating, sometimes
overnight.
Every moment people weren’t looking, Ythna wept into her loose sleeve.
Until one day when she brought some hot barley wine to the Beldame
herself, doing the five-point turn as she’d been taught, ending up on
one knee with the tray raised before the wrought iron chair.
Ythna was eight or nine years old, and she made sure not to look at the
Beldame’s white round face, as she knelt. But in Ythna’s eagerness to
avoid looking on her mistress, she found herself gazing, instead, at the
papers the Beldame was studying. Ythna started reading them, until the
Beldame noticed.
“You can read that?” the Beldame said.
Ythna nodded, terrified.
“And tell me, what do you think of it?” the Beldame asked.
Ythna stammered at first, but at last she shared a few thoughts about
the document, which dealt with the rebellious offworld colonists, and
the problems with maintaining order in the fringes of the Empire here on
Earth. The Beldame asked more questions, and Ythna answered as best she
could. After that, the Beldame sent her away—but then Ythna found
herself chosen to bring food and drink to the Beldame often. And
sometimes, the Beldame would invite her to sit for a moment at her feet,
and talk to her.
Years passed. One day, word came that the Beldame was going to be
elevated to the Emperor’s Thousand, so she would be in the same direct
relationship to the Emperor that the Beldame’s thousand retainers were
to her. There would be a massive ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown
Emperor, at which the Beldame would be given a steel thimble,
symbolizing the fact that she was becoming one of the Emperor’s own
fingers. Ythna couldn’t even imagine that she could be one-thousandth of
the woman who was one-thousandth of the Emperor. She watched the
sunrise between the mountain peaks below the Beldame’s arched picture
windows and laughed at the floor brush in her hand.
“A lot is going to change for all of us,” said Maryn, who had grown
into a striking young woman who still bossed around the other retainers.
“Strange foods, new places. All the more reason to keep our behavior
perfect. The Beldame is counting on us.”
Ythna said nothing. She was still smaller than Maryn, barely noticeable
except for her ribbons of long black hair, down to her waist, and the
way she ran through the stone passages of the fortress, her bare feet as
silent as snow melting, when nobody else was around.
The day came nearer, and they all traveled for a week by steam truck
and Monopod to the Tomb of the Unknown Emperor. At last, they saw it in
the distance, looming over the plains: a great structure, shaped like an
old letter M, with two great pillars supporting the black canopy. The
Unknown Emperor had lain in state for over a hundred years there, behind
a faceless statue that raised one hand to the people who’d served him
without knowing his name.
They all lined up in rows, the thousand of them, at the base of the
Tomb, while the Beldame climbed to the very top. Some of the retainers
were playing small bells, and sweet smoke was coming up out of brass
pipes all around them. The Officiators were leading Ythna and the others
in ceremonial chants. Ythna could see the tiny figure of the Beldame,
emerging on top of the structure, as the Emperor himself bestowed the
thimble on her. A voice, one of the Chief Officiators, spoke of the
hundreds of years of tradition they honored today.
Ythna thought that she could not be any more deliriously proud than she
was at this moment, watching her friend and mistress elevated. Her only
wish was that she could see the Beldame Thakrra up close at this
moment, to behold the look on Thakrra’s face.
A second later, Ythna had her desire. The Beldame lay on the ground
directly in front of her, lying on her back, her small body broken by
the fall from the top of the structure. Her gentle, lined face was still
recognizable, inside her brocaded robe and twelve-peaked silken hat,
but she had no expression at all, and blood was leaking out all over the
ground, until it lapped against Ythna’s bare feet. She could not help
but panic that maybe her selfish wish had caused this to happen.
Next to Ythna, Maryn saw the Beldame’s corpse and began wailing in a
loud, theatrical fashion. The other retainers heard Maryn and followed
her lead, making a sound like a family of cats. Ythna, meanwhile, could
barely choke out a single tear, and it hurt like a splinter coming out.
Frantic to avoid seeing the Beldame like this, Ythna looked up—just as a
strange woman stepped out of the nearest pillar in the Tomb. The woman
had long curly red hair under a pillbox hat shaped like one of the
lacquered discs where the Beldame had kept her spare monocles. She had a
sharp nose and chin, and quick gray eyes. And she wore a long black
coat, with embroidered sleeves and shoulders, and shiny brass buttons
with cords looping around them. She looked like a commanding general
from an old-fashioned foreign army.
The red-haired woman stepped forward, looked around, and took in the
scene. Then she said a curse word in a language that Ythna had never
heard, and slipped away around the side of the Tomb, before anybody else
noticed her.
Check out the rest of it over at Tor.com!
